Austerity Leads Ensemble to Adapt

William Christie plans to lead his Baroque ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, in a pair of concerts at Versailles next summer to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the death of Louis XIV, whose patronage established the French musical style that Mr. Christie has helped revive.

The music of that era — works by Lully, Charpentier, Couperin, Marais and others — lives on, thanks in large part to groups like Les Arts Florissants. The extravagant court patronage, not so much. Now, as Europe grapples with austerity measures and changing paradigms in arts funding, Mr. Christie said that his ensemble, like many others, is learning to adapt.

It is not all cutbacks. This winter Les Arts Florissants will move across Paris to La Philharmonie de Paris, the grand concert hall designed by Jean Nouvel that is scheduled to open in January. But at the same time, Mr. Christie said, his ensemble is losing the support it has received for 25 years for performing and teaching in Caen, where the city and regional French governments are cutting back. So he is stepping up his private fund-raising.

“Trying to get private money, or corporate money, in France, is very difficult — there is no tradition,” Mr. Christie said in an interview this month in New York, which he was visiting, he said wryly, to “hold out my hand.” It is something European institutions, large and small, are learning to do after the downturn led many governments to cut spending on the arts.

His ensemble may be better positioned than many for an era of reduced government subsidies: Mr. Christie said that about three-quarters of its budget came from concert fees, with only about a quarter coming from government subsidies and private support. And Les Arts Florissants already has a number of private donors, including an American sponsor who is helping it expand its prodigious catalog of CDs this season with four new recordings on its in-house label.

Les Arts Florissants — the group takes its name from a short opera by Charpentier — will tour this season in Europe, South America and North America, where it will perform in April at Lincoln Center, according to a season announcement the group released this week. Its pending move to the new Philharmonie, where the Orchestre de Paris will be the resident orchestra, highlights the extent to which Mr. Christie — a harpsichordist, conductor and musicologist from Buffalo — has come to be accepted, and revered, in France.

“If I’d come in and wanted, perhaps, to play Ravel or Debussy, it might have been harder,” Mr. Christie said of his arrival in France more than 40 years ago. “I came in doing Couperin and Rameau and composers the French had never heard of.”

Still, he said, things did not always go smoothly for a newcomer, and he recalled some of his early missteps.

“I made some pretty unfortunate sorts of remarks,” he said. “I remember telling a journalist from Le Figaro, ‘You know, you’ve got so much cultural baggage — and you simply can’t carry it all. So we’re here, foreigners, to pick up the bags and help you.’ ”

But his successes, his persistence and his decision to become a French citizen have helped convince French audiences that he is serious about his work. Now, as he prepares to take up residence in the Philharmonie, where an emphasis will be put on teaching, Mr. Christie said he would be cutting back on his appearances with other orchestras.

“The work that I’m doing with other orchestras is pretty much winding down,” said Mr. Christie, who conducted “The Enchanted Island” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2012 and has appeared at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, among other places.

Mr. Christie has his own festival to run now: Dans les Jardins de William Christie, which will be held for the fourth time next summer in his gardens in the Vendée region of France. The festival brings together Les Arts Florissants; Mr. Christie’s students from the Juilliard School; Arts Flo Juniors, students from French conservatories; and members of Le Jardin des Voix, an academy for young singers that was started in 2002.

The festival will cap another year of presenting works by 17th- and 18th-century composers in a wide variety of settings.

One highlight will come in January, when Mr. Christie is to conduct André Campra’s 1710 opera-ballet, “Les Fêtes Vénitiennes,” at the Opéra Comique in Paris, in a new production directed by Robert Carsen.

Les Arts Florissants is commemorating the 250th anniversary of the death of Rameau with a 10-CD boxed set featuring many of Mr. Christie’s Rameau recordings released by the Harmonia Mundi label, and a tour of Luxembourg, Moscow and London with the program “Rameau, Maître à Danser,” presenting two of his choreographed one-act ballets.

And Mr. Christie will bring Les Arts Florissants and six singers from Le Jardin des Voix to New York on April 23 for a concert of Italian music at Alice Tully Hall as part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series.

When Les Arts Florissants tours South America, it will be with a smaller ensemble than it traveled with in the past. “It gives me the possibility of scaling down, and I like that,” Mr. Christie said.